elyssian fields

 

Sitting on a bench by the riverbank.

Grasses swaying into the distance on either side of the waters.

My spirit exults.

Aware of the sudden elation, I wonder to myself: "What's going on? Am I going into ecstasy at the sight of a few fields?"

I am quite bemused by the whole thing.

My mind is certainly thrilled by it.

But why?

Oh.

I suppose it's the contemplation that mankind with all our technolgoy can't make a single blade of grass.

And here I am looking at what? millions? billions? of swaying grasses, in the botanical sense perhaps God's most ordinary thing.

We can't make even one of those.

The great thinker William Paley came up with a quite insightful refutation of atheistic Darwinism. He was a prescient fellow because he refuted Darwin about fifty years before Darwin formulated his evolutionary theory. I would qualify this by saying Darwinian theory is not necessarily atheistic but has been co opted by atheists ever since its inception.

Paley's insight which predated Darwinism and has been the bugbear of Darwinists for 150 years, was about picturing himself finding a watch in the woods and concluding there must have been a watchmaker, and then applying the thought to the universe and concluding there must be a God. It is still the insight atheists feel most threatened by today.

Witness Richard Dawkins who suggests in his book (named for Paley's aphorism) The Blind Watchmaker that the watchmaker who created reality and life is not God but random forces of nature exerting themselves over limitless time.

I think a relevant caveat for Mr Dawkins might be intentionality.

It is conceivable that a blind watchmaker could make beautiful things.

But it may not be coherent to suggest that a blind watchmaker who does not intend to make anything, has in fact made everything, the whole suite of existence, universe, planets, natural laws, nature, life itself and the grasses on the riverbank.

I suggest that Mr Dawkins refutation of Paley fails here.

Mr Dawkins has a proposed refutation for those of us bowled over by the wonderment of grasses swaying along the riverbank.

He dismisses the wonderment of creation, and the sense of wonder some of us cite on beholding creation, as essentially a superstitious lack of real knowledge about causality. He suggests that far from being supremely well designed, nature and living things are poorly designed.

Again his nemesis William Paley has anticipated this best of atheists by oh about 200 years.

Two centuries before Mr Dawkins came along claiming living things were poorly designed, Paley had the measure of him in asserting: "It is not possible to refute a sneer."

Meanwhile the present day Mr Dawkins' trump card in seeking to refute the evidence of wonderment in existence is to suggest those of us who cite wonderment as an indicator of God, believe only in a God of the gaps, a God who explains the gaps in our knowledge, a God who explains for us what has not yet been explained by atheism.

But as with the grasses, everything is gaps.

The best of scientists admit it is so.

All our scientific accomplishments have in essence explained nothing.

Life.

The atom.

The cell.

Time.

Electricity.

Light.

The consistencies we call laws of nature.

The swaying grasses.

We don't know what any of these are.

Science (which in its positive aspects I suggest has been gifted to humanity from God via the Judaeo Christian tradition) cannot in itself create, explain or even begin to define the atom, the cell, life, time, electricity, light, or indeed any of the other fundamental aspects of existence or experience you care to mention.

Experience.

There's another one.

Experience happens through consciousness.

And we don't even know what consciousness is.

We don't even know what is is.

Niels Bohr who came up with a widely accepted model of the atom is supposed to have commented when people said he was a genius for modelling the atom: "The atom is other than we can imagine."

De Broglie the leading theoretician on light for many decades is supposed to have said: "What would we not know if we only knew what a ray of light is!"

Here is the news.

We cannot make a single blade of grass in the laboratory.

We cannot make a single cell.

Early Darwinists had believed that cells would be so simple in their essence that it would soon be easy to produce them from a controlled laboratory process, a process they foresaw parodying their wildest most superstitious fantasies about the beginning of life, ie lightning striking a swamp pool and a lizard crawling out of the mud. Darwin's supporters have been sure for the past 150 years that soon mankind would be whipping up cells in laboratories.

It never happened.

The mathematician Berlinski has recently claimed that the information we know about the complexity of any cell has increased to the dimensions of a galaxy compared to what we knew even fifty years ago.

The bio chemist James Tour is currently claiming that 150 years after Darwin's theory was promulgated, the possibility of human beings creating a living cell in a laboratory has grown further away not nearer because we now know a cell is infinitely more complicated than what Darwin postulated it would be.

Hilarious no.

I'm resisting the urge to sneer simply because Mr Dawkins has given sneering a bad name.

Sitting by the riverbank I rejoice at the splendour in the grass.

And I thank the force that drives the constellations for my life and for every human being's life and for all the creation which praises him truly by its very being.

God made the world.

He did not make any mistakes.